


disappearing for you

by alpacasandravens



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Lonely!Martin, a lot of angsting over tim as well, helen is just trying to help, she just... doesn't go about it well
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-06
Updated: 2019-09-06
Packaged: 2020-10-10 20:57:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20534492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alpacasandravens/pseuds/alpacasandravens
Summary: Martin just wants to be left alone, but those yellow doors just won't go away.





	disappearing for you

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first time writing either of these characters, but I HAD to after today's episode. title from Nice and Quiet by Bedouine because I heard this song live and started crying about Jonmartin in the venue.

The first time Martin sees the yellow door, it’s just across the hall from his office. Or, this isn’t exactly the first time he’s seen the door - Michael had shoved him through it once, such a long time ago now. And he’s seen it around the Archives, back in the beginning when he still let himself go down there. But this is the first time it’s come for him.

He sees it when he steps out of the bathroom. He’s drying his hands on his pants (Peter’s reluctance to deal with anyone meant he hadn’t done anything about the maintenance staff’s refusal to set foot in this hallway) and absentmindedly walking back to his chair on muscle memory when he sees that garish yellow out of the corner of his eye.

_That’s funny_, he thinks, _I thought the Eye would be more careful with what it lets in here_. Then he shakes his head, thinking of a cobweb-patterned lighter he’d seen Jon absentmindedly spinning between his fingers so many times. Thinking of the worms and the Flesh and the cold fog that’s even now wrapping around his ankles. 

The Eye has never been careful.

He sees it again three days later. He’s in the break room, pulling a sad-looking egg sandwich from the fridge and pretending it doesn’t bother him that the ticking of the wall clock (9:41 pm, far too late to still be working) is the loudest sound in the room.

There’s the slightest change in the air, and the door behind Martin is no longer the peeling, green-painted fake wood he remembered. It is yellow, and seems too big for its frame. 

“Helen,” he says reproachfully. He’s tired. 

The door does not budge. If anything, Martin would say that the door is begging to be opened. 

“Helen, let me go,” he says again. “I’m not yours to take.”

There is a sigh of disappointment that fills the room, and the yellow door is gone. Martin opens the green Institute door, peering through it before walking through. He decides that maybe it is time to head home for the night after all.

The door doesn’t give up. It appears set in the left wall of his office and sits for an entire day. Its presence does him no harm, so he ignores it, even if the temptation to see what’s on the other side (as though he doesn’t already know) grows stronger by the minute. 

It appears on the Tube, a wooden door with no frame out of place against the sliding steel of the cars. There is no one else on the train, though Martin cannot be sure if he is truly alone or has slid so far into the Lonely he simply can’t see them. He doesn’t remember this train ever being empty before everything.

It stands in the middle of the grocery store. Martin picks up a half gallon of milk and adds it to his basket, ignoring the yellow door that hangs, half open though it is attached to nothing, just in front of the coffee creamers. He glares at it and is glad he doesn’t drink coffee - if he had wanted creamer, this would have been much more annoying. As it is, he doesn’t like being stalked.

When it pops up next to the printer, Martin gives in. He leaves his paper on the printer (a polite reminder for staff to clean out the break room microwave after use) and turns the handle. It is warm under his grip, almost alive. It opens too easily. Like the door had been eagerly waiting to open. Martin knows it had.

He walks in because he’s done. Helen has been annoying him for too long - why won’t she just leave him alone? Everyone else has had no trouble. Even Jon hasn’t sought him out in months. He doesn’t know if he was ever important to Jon, but he knows that Jon had more reason to care than an avatar he had never even met. And Helen can’t be trying to feed on him - she should see how impossible that would be.

So he intends to march directly up to Helen and demand to be left alone. But as soon as the door closes behind him, his plan flies right out of his head.

There’s something about time that makes you forget. Martin knows this all too well - he’s been so successful in forgetting so much. Sometimes he wishes he hadn’t forgotten, just for a moment wants to know what color Jon’s eyes are again, wants to remember Tim and Sasha laughing at an off-color joke at a holiday party. 

This was never something he wanted to remember. Just for a moment, first looking down that endless hallway, constantly curving slightly to the left, he remembered being thrown in here with Tim as Michael gleefully watched Jon’s death. Jon hadn’t died, but he hadn’t known that - all he’d known was three days of endless wandering, sick with worry and hunger, a headache building from the hideous patterns and Tim’s constant muttered swearing.

Martin has been terrified so many times in his life. He’s been scared for so long it’s less of an emotion and more of a state of being. Being trapped in the corridors hadn’t been the scariest experience of them all, he supposes, though ranking them properly would be impossible. But these memories aren’t just fear, they’re sadness and worry and the certainty that even if he survived, something in him would be as broken as whatever had cracked in Tim. 

The flash of panic quickly subsides this time around. He knows he can’t be trapped here forever.

Last time, even as Tim was breaking they had been able to comfort each other just through their presence. This time, Martin has no one, and he knows that is better. He is Forsaken, and the Spiral cannot hurt him.

He’s going to find Helen.

Helen doesn’t let him find her immediately. She waits, and she twists the pictures and the mirrors on the wall. Martin walks down the corridor, never taking the branching paths and always staying silent, even though he feels he should be storming. He sees things change in the pictures, but only out of the corner of his eye.

To his right, Sasha stands in the corridor, so far away he can barely see her. When he tries to look closer, she is gone, and he is left with only the knowledge that he had seen her. He still doesn’t remember what she looked like.

On his left, Tim walks through four mirrors at his side, flashing a sad smile before blinking out of existence. He hadn’t disappeared so quickly in reality, or so cleanly. Martin knows he’d missed him, when the police had pulled his mangled body out of the rubble, when he’d spread his ashes alone because there was no one else to help. 

Everywhere he looks, he sees Jon. The first time had been in a floor-to-ceiling mirror at the end of the hall, and Jon had looked so light. Martin caught himself speeding up, practically running to him (even though he wasn’t there and he didn’t want him to be - how sad was that?) before Jon’s fingers elongated and his face twisted over on itself. He ignores him after that.

The carpeting was green when Martin walked in. He wanders for long enough that it runs through yellow, orange, and pink, and the carpet is a deep blood red when he finally sees the door. The same yellow door he walked through what feels like hours ago, yellow and looming, at the end of the hallway. Not that the hallway ever ends.

Helen is standing in front of the door, leaning against the walls in what is clearly a position calculated to look both effortless and imposing. Even from a distance, she doesn’t appear normal (not like Jon, he thinks, and then remembers how corpselike Jon has been since he came back). She still wears the blazer and pencil skirt of a businesswoman, but the colors have been shifted. They are iridescent and ever-changing and if he tried to describe them he thinks his brain would melt. Her hands are too long, stretching and twisting down until her nails, still manicured a perfect baby pink, almost brush the floor. Her mouth is too wide for her face and there’s something spinning behind her eyes that gives Martin vertigo, and he thinks wryly that Vast isn’t her god.

“Leave me alone,” Martin says, but all of the force he’d meant to put behind this earlier had vanished in the countless hours he’d spent trapped here.

“Do you want to be alone?” Helen asks. Her voice is musical, like an off-tune accordion.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why have you been following me?”

Helen tuts. “No, no. I asked first.”

“Fine. I have to save the world, you know. And I have to be alone to do it.”

“Do you know what people call me?”

“Helen,” Martin says, rolling his eyes.

“I do enjoy that name,” Helen says. “But I have many. I was Michael, and we are Distortion. But there are other names. Descriptors. A favorite is Es Mentiras. Do you know what that means?”

“Why don’t you enlighten me.”

“Lies. I am lies, and I know when I am being lied to.”

“That’s nice for you,” Martin says.

“Quite.”

“Will you stop bugging me now?” Martin says, exasperated. He regrets using the word ‘bugging’, as it has a few too many implications.

Helen understands, and something flashes in her eyes at the word, but she steps aside, and the door opens behind her. Through it, Martin sees the familiar cheap carpeting of the Institute. He moves to leave when she says “You miss more than you think, hiding in that fog of yours.”

“Excuse me?” Martin asks, barely a foot from the door.

“Jon talks to me.” She smiles when she says it, her words sinking hooks into Martin, and she knows it.

“I’m glad he has a friend,” Martin says, putting as much venom into the words as he can. He wants her to know exactly how terrible of a friend he thinks she would be, how stupid it is that she’s telling him.

“Saving the world is such a difficult thing. Hard to put your faith in. But saving a person…”

“You shut it.”

“You can’t save him.”

“Who said anything about -”

Though she is standing several feet away, one of Helen’s long fingers catches the base of Martin’s chin and forces his head up. He is tall but she is, somehow, taller. “You. Can’t. Save. Him.” She taps another finger on his Adam’s apple to punctuate every word. “He’s become such a good little Archivist.”

“I don’t care about Jon.” Martin doesn’t blink, refuses to back down from Helen’s piercing gaze.

Helen laughs, and the sound echoes through the corridors and around the inside of Martin’s skull and it hurts. “If you say so,” she says. 

Martin turns to leave. He’s had enough, and he’s going back to his office. He has work to do.

“I’m only trying to help him,” Helen says as he starts walking. “He needs to accept his calling, as I did. That’s the only way you can help him now.”

Martin ignores her as he slams the door behind him. He is in the Archive, and he carefully pulls the fog around himself. He can’t let anyone see him here - can’t even be here, not really. He has to be alone.

The door to Jon’s office is open as he passes it. A recorder is running, and Martin hates how even how he is calmed by the familiar sound of the tape. He doesn’t hear them much anymore, and when he does they’re coming to be associated more with Peter and his frustrating unhelpfulness than with Jon. 

“I have to trust him,” Jon says to the tape. “I have to trust he knows what he’s doing, but… I just miss him.” 

Martin hurries along. He doesn’t let himself look in Jon’s open, inviting door.

If he does, he’s afraid he might never leave.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed!! Comments/kudos feed my soul, or come yell about this show with me @alpacasandravens on tumblr!!


End file.
